Towards a Support System for Course Design
Omar Talbi
1,2
, Bruno Warin
1,3
and Christophe Kolski
3,4,5
1
Univ Littoral Côte d’Opale, LISIC, 50 rue Ferdinand Buisson, F-62100 Calais, France
2
Univ. Aboubekr BELKAID, Tlemcen, Algeria
3
Univ Lille Nord de France, 1bis rue Georges Lefèvre, F-59000 Lille, France
4
UVHC, LAMIH, Le Mont-Houy, F-59313 Valenciennes, France
5
UVHC, LAMIH, CNRS, UMR 8201, F-59313 Valenciennes, France
Keywords: Course Design, Instructional Engineering, Higher Education, Support System, LCMS, TCMS.
Abstract: Many stakeholders in higher education develop with time. In this paper, we propose a new type of platform,
called a Teaching Content Management System (TCMS). Such platforms are intended for instructors to help
them produce teaching specifications and quality teaching designs. We first of all present drivers of change
that currently affect universities and we discuss some specific aspects of education in higher education. We
then derive a set of support requirements for instructors and provide a services design that TCMS should
comply with.
1 INTRODUCTION
Learning Content Management Systems (LCMS),
also called Learning Management Systems (LMS)
have been developed gradually over the past fifteen
years across all levels of education (Zou et al.,
2012). These Internet-based platforms are mainly
designed to foster the creation and sharing of
content, and interaction between instructors and
students, by using the Web (Bennett et al., 2006).
Almost all universities make LCMS available to
their students and instructors such platforms as
Blackboard (http://www.blackboard.com) or Moodle
(http://moodle.org). LCMS platforms provide rich
opportunities for teaching students, but few
opportunities, if any, to help instructors in specifying
and designing their teaching courses.
Therefore, most instructors manage the
preparation and design of their courses in a
traditional manner and are poorly equipped in
information technology in the area of specification
and design of their teaching courses (Ottenbreit-
Leftwich et al., 2012). The question of developing a
support system to help instructors to specify and
professionally manage the construction of their
teaching courses was raised with a view to
supplement LCMS. In Section 2, we first show the
development factors and constraints that currently
weigh on higher education. In Section 3, we set out
the objectives for TCMS in the form of strategic
support requirements that the TCMS should satisfy,
based on the analysis of the previous section, some
specific aspects of higher education and our long
years of experience in higher education. In Section
4, we then propose a preliminary design in the form
of a system comprising three support axes that are
detailed as follows: 1) improving instructor
knowledge and professional skills 2) management of
a professional knowledge base 3) project realization.
In Section 5 we discuss about TCMS as a new
concept and also about its practical implementation
and usefulness. In Section 6, we offer our
conclusions and perspectives for future research.
2 STATE OF ART OF
DEVELOPMENT FACTORS
WEIGHING ON HIGHER
EDUCATION
The profession of instructor has been changed by
several development factors in recent years. Six
important factors are presented in this section.
An initial factor relates to the continuing
progress of ICT that transcends communication,
coordination, knowledge management, production of
learning tool or objects and the scripting of teaching.
449
Talbi O., Warin B. and Kolski C..
Towards a Support System for Course Design.
DOI: 10.5220/0004411704490454
In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2013), pages 449-454
ISBN: 978-989-8565-53-2
Copyright
c
2013 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
This first factor has caused the President of Stanford
University to state "Just as technology disrupted and
transformed the newspaper and music industries, it
is now poised to wreak havoc upon another
established industry: higher education" (Hennessy,
2012).
A second factor relates to how the mission
entrusted to higher education has developed. Thus, a
vast professionalization movement has lead to the
requirement of providing training programs that are
closer to the concerns of businesses while seeking to
provide training throughout life (Pisa, 2005). This
leads to an evolution in the perception of knowledge
and to the development of curricula definitions
based on skills and business rationale with more
useful knowledge that can be immediately applied
(D'Andrea and Gosling, 2005).
A third factor relates to the professionalization of
instructors and educational systems. It is reflected in
the many reforms of university systems and a vast
movement for the development of quality assurance
(Manjula and Vaideeswaran, 2011). It participates in
the consideration of teaching as a project where the
product is student learning (Van Rooij, 2010).
A fourth factor relates to the changing profile of
students, particularly in respect of their number and
behaviour. This "Y" generation is more critical of
the relevance of knowledge that the university
wishes to teach it, than the previous generation
(Roberson, 2011). Thus, we need a teaching design
framework that produces more elaborate teaching
activities capable of adapting to this new audience.
A fifth factor is the considerable growth and
diversification of knowledge taught. This makes
knowledge more difficult to acquire and less
sustainable. Thus the search of knowledge and it
capitalization are becoming fondamental.
A sixth factor relates to advances in the diffusion
of research in teaching and learning. Indeed during
the last two decades, this research has led to the
emergence of new ideas such as active learning,
significant learning, and educative assessment.
These techniques are better suited to new student
profiles and enable the development of learning
techniques that are closer to current training needs
(Warin et al., 2011a).
This state of art shows that the knowledge and
skills that are now required for an instructor are no
longer confined exclusively to their subject, but also
relate to the use of Information Technology and
Communication (ICT), teaching systems, student
profile and expectations, the development of
knowledge and teaching methods. The major
challenge for instructors is no longer access to
knowledge but the ability to take ownership of it, to
organize relevant educational activities to enhance
the learning of their students, and to justify
themselves economically within the educational
system.
3 PROPOSITION: TCMS AS NEW
TYPE OF SUPPORT SYSTEM
Thus, the question of developing a support system to
help instructors to specify and professionally
manage the construction of their teaching courses
was raised. The top diagram in Figure 1 shows that
TCMS will help instructors by impacting on their
teaching knowledge, subject knowledge, etc., as well
as on their work methods and organization. Its goal
will be to foster the creation or development of
teaching, improve instructor skills and integrate
developments that weigh on higher education. The
entire Figure 1 shows the differences in
requirements, constraints and objectives between
TCMS and LCMS. The purpose of TCMS is
teaching specification and design, whereas the
purpose of LCMS is the implementation and
monitoring of teaching with students.
Figure 1: TCMS versus LCMS.
From an operational strategy perspective, current
technology makes it possible to foresee an Internet
based client / server tool, accessible anywhere,
anytime, on various media from a PC to a
smartphone. In fact, TCMS could use current
technology platforms such as Moodle and even be
directly integrated into them.
From a strategy point of view of functional
requirements: the support to be provided must take
into account the specific manner that Higher
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450
Education instructors operate, who, for the most
have never learned to teach (Bergin et al., 2001),
must devote an important part of their activities to
research, upon which their recognition and
promotion are based (Harzing, 2010), and finally,
for which the systematic creation principles or
methods of current learning systems, such as the
highly structured ADDIE (Molenda, 2003) or MISA
(Paquette, 2010), do not correspond to their work
traditions. Having to learn to use any computer-
software teaching tool is one of the major hindrances
to their use (Rößling et al., 2008). Thus, TCMS
should incorporate its own learning system and be
used at different levels of expertise adapted to the
skills of the instructor who uses it.
4 THREEFOLD DESIGN OF
TCMS
In order to assist instructor in these new challenges,
we suggest that TCMS be built around three support
axes: 1) Improving the instructor knowledge and
professions skills 2) Management of a professional
knowledge base and 3) Project realization. These
three axes are detailed here after. This threefold
design enables ownership to be taken in an iterative
and incremental manner. The instructor is free to use
one or more axes. Inside the first axis, ownership
can be taken through several levels provided by a
framework based on five sub-axes. Thus the
instructor is free to build their engineering at their
own pace. In doing so, our platform can include both
the first time instructor, or the inexperienced
instructor, and the experienced instructor.
4.1 Support for Improving Instructor
Knowledge and Professional Skills
Providing support to instructors by making updated
knowledge and skills related to their instructor
profession available to them. This axis will not
simply be a mere repository of knowledge, but will
also offer activities to learn and master these skills
and knowledge. We propose that this axis be
structured and developed through a framework that
consists of five quality sub-axes: (1) Teaching
technique, (2) Subjects (knowledge to be taught), (3)
Scripting (4) Technology and (5) Research and
innovation. Using a framework to frame the content
of this axis has two advantages: it will organize the
implementation of the future system, but it will also,
by being designed with relatively independent sub-
axes, offer multiple entries to future teaching users
that will facilitate the full adhesion of instructors to
the system, through the possibility of gradual
ownership.
Teaching Technique. This sub-axis relates to
teaching basics. Its goal is to help instructors in
identifying and taking ownership of basic teaching
techniques. This sub-axis of the future platform will
be responsible for managing teaching basics and
basic teaching techniques, such as: knowing how to
classify knowledge to be taught, knowing how to
define educational objectives, knowing student
learning conditions and strategies, etc. This part will
be based on the classical works of Bloom,
Krathwohl, Mager, Glaser, Gagne, Jonassen, etc., for
which we do not provide an exhaustive list of
references in this article due to lack of space. An
interested reader can refer to Talon et al. (2012) for
more information. The knowledge required for the
"Teaching Technique" sub-axis is more of the
academic knowledge type and will require limited
effort by the instructor to master.
Figure 2: High-level use case of the “Support for
improving instructor knowledge and professional skills”
axis.
This "Teaching technique" sub-axis will also
offer, 1) learning activities to learn the basic
teaching techniques, 2) software for validating
teaching knowledge, and 3) course definition tools.
All or part of the results produced, such as the
teaching objectives, can be automatically exported,
depending on the opportunity, to the LCMS part of
the platform to be brought to the knowledge of
students. Figure 2 illustrates the main use cases for
this "Teaching Technique" sub-axis. These use cases
TowardsaSupportSystemforCourseDesign
451
are written in the well-known UML language
(http://www.uml.org/).
Subjects. This sub-axis relates to the content to be
taught: computer science, mathematics, languages,
etc. It aims to make resources validated by the best
experts in the field available to instructors. Semi-
automatic quality assessment tools of a priori
resources can be integrated into this sub-axis.
Indeed, an unidentified or authorless resource can be
detected a priori as being of lesser quality. Similarly,
in order to be classified as quality, these resources
should not be mere knowledge repositories, but must
be "comprehensive" in the sense that they must be
accompanied by a teaching framework that
facilitates their ownership or adaptation by the
instructor: context, wording, specific correction
elements, precise evaluation criteria, feedback, etc.
Professional monitoring, based on peer review and
feedback, can be put in place to assess the quality
and relevance of resources.
Scripting. This sub-axis relates to more developed
and more practical knowledge in relation to
teaching. It aims to enable instructors to identify and
take ownership of complex teaching strategies, such
as, for example, serious games techniques or project-
based learning. The volume and complexity of
additional knowledge that instructors have to master
is not the same as those of the "Teaching.
Technology. This sub-axis relates to the technology
for helping instructors in relation to teaching
methods. These are generic tools, whereas the
technology tools related to the subject taught will be
associated with the "Subjects" sub-axis. For
example, visualization software to run a sorting
algorithm will be integrated into the “Subjects” sub-
axis. The purpose of this "Technology" sub-axis is to
facilitate the use of ICT by instructors to manage
their teaching activities. For example, in the near
future, instructors that have mastered the Moodle or
Blackboard type e-learning platform will have a
distinct advantage. All the more as there are recent
techniques that facilitate their configuration (Drira et
al., 2011).
Research and Innovation. This sub-axis relates to
knowledge, processes and tools that facilitate the
production of knowledge and innovation practices. It
aims to help instructors in mastering the techniques
of knowledge acquisition or creation, be they
teaching or subject knowledge as advocated by
Labour and Kolski (2010). It is important that an
instructor masters access to bibliography databases
and to simple techniques, that are not well know by
many instructors, in relation to quality indices such
the impact factor, the h-index and the g-index
(Harzing, 2010), etc.
4.2 Support for the Management of a
Professional Knowledge
Whether to support the creation or development of
their teaching or to achieve research results,
instructors need to improve and manage their
professional knowledge. The purpose of this axis is
to provide a content management system that
enables them to store, classify and enrich their
professional knowledge.
In this content management system we need to
distinguish free knowledge from other knowledge.
Free knowledge can be freely modified and
distributed without charge by the instructor. Free
knowledge, even if there are different modalities of
implementation (http://creativecommons.org) is the
only knowledge that the teacher can reuse, improve,
adapt and distribute for free during his teachings.
The concept of free knowledge is important because
it allows the teacher to remain master of his own
issues: reducing the time spent in preparation, high
quality educational resources provided, accuracy of
knowledge disseminated and adaptation to the
student audience.
Traditional knowledge can be managed
effectively in the TCMS with bibliographic
management tools such as for example, Mendeley
software (http://Mendeley.com), possibly with
additional functions and search rankings. Free
knowledge included in the TCMS will be managed
using a tool that combines the functions of a
traditional CMS for its ability to store and organize
knowledge, with those of a versioning tool.
Evolutions must be stored including dates and major
changes but also the identification of their
contributors. Free knowledge does not mean
anonymous knowledge. In addition, in connection
with the third axis, Support for project realization,
the tool will provide support for the capitalization of
knowledge, acquired during the implementation of
these third axis projects.
4.3 Support for Project Realization
This is the provision of support for the good
management of instructor activities during the
preparation and implementation of their teaching
courses. We recommend a project management
approach, in the sense of industrial project
management (PMBOK, 2008). In this context, the
TCMS will encourage and support the instructor, via
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the available tools, to rigorously set their teaching
specification: topics, prerequisites, content, teaching
objectives, start and end dates, specific material
conditions, etc. It will also enable the incorporation
of specific context: implementation of teaching
objectives, estimated time set aside for preparation,
the instructor’s level of command of the subject
being taught, the instructor’s personal goals in
respect of the teaching, etc.
A major objective of the specification of this
project mode is to get the instructors to capitalize the
fruit of their teaching over course to be taken from
one year to another and to be enriched, etc., but it
should also support instructors in bringing together
several teaching courses, whether they come from
them or from a colleague.
5 DISCUSSION
In this section we discuss if TCMS is a new concept
and also we discuss its practical implementation and
usefulness.
Related Works. The first question concerns existing
previous works. Is this concept of TCMS new? Are
there existing tools to support it? In our literature
search we found similarities with the proposed
concept in the Drona work of Anjali (2011).
However, no theoretical support is given. There is
also little detail. Some other works such as (Polson
et al., 2005) introduce a TCMS but reading the
relevant articles shows that they actually speak of an
LCMS not of a TCMS. Several works such as
(Juang et al., 2008), which are interested in
improving teaching skills and teaching practices, are
more interested by the relationship between teacher
and his institution. Again these works cover a very
small part of axis 3 of the TCMS. They do not offer
a global solution to the teacher. We could not cite all
the research related to our proposal, particularly the
works carried out by the English-speaking
institutions (English, American, Australian and
Canadian) in the movement "scholarship of teaching
and learning" (SoTL, http). However, to the best of
our knowledge, the concept of TCMS proposed in
this article is new, or at least very little developed so
far in the literature.
Design Choice. The second question in this
discussion is the design of our tool. What type (s) of
tool (s) to develop? Apart from the fact that it will be
Web-based, several options are available to us. We
chose to develop it by integrating it in a CMS. For
our first tests, we chose the popular Moodle
platform. Figure 3 shows a possible integration that
takes advantage of the malleability of Moodle in
which three spaces were created for the three axes
described in this article. This type of development
that will reuse part of the back-office, such as user
management, should also promote the adoption of
our tool by teachers who are already using this type
of LCMS (of course, assessment will carried out to
prove this) and facilitate the provision to students of
lessons designed by teachers.
Figure 3: Mock-up of the TCMS home page.
Utility Considerations. The third question concerns
the usefulness of such a platform. Would these tools
be useful? Our specifications were used in few
courses. Some of the tools used were MS-Project
and the Moodle platform. A part of implementation
has however been done manually. As result of this
first experimentation, teachers concerned won an
Award for Educational Innovation in a contest that
involved seven French universities (Warin et al.,
2011b). These teachers did not follow all the
suggestions of our specification, but those that were
contributed to the winning.
6 CONCLUSIONS
This article looked at instructor-centered teaching
engineering in academia. We highlighted six major
development factors that require the rethinking of
instructor work methods. We proposed a supplement
to LCMS introduced in universities by adding a new
type of feature: Teaching Content Management
System (TCMS). The goal of a TCMS is to support
instructors in the specification and design of their
teaching so that they reach a high level of
professionalism. We have emphasized that TCMS
should be designed to enable iterative and
incremental ownership. We therefore proposed a
general design of the services that TCMS should
offer. The first prototype of a TCMS is under
TowardsaSupportSystemforCourseDesign
453
development. It aims to make the system more
holistic than the short presentation in three axes
suggests. Next works will focus to prove that its use
provides assistance to engage the instructor in
reflexive inquiry of its practices and facilitates
opportunities to work with other colleagues. Indeed,
a collective effort should be based on individual
strong skills: to be a strong individual support to the
instructor it’s exactly the purpose of a TCMS.
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